Category: Modern – Contemporary

The University of Chicago has recently released a new web resource called Public Art on Campus which seeks to catalog, document, and provide contextual and critical information about the works of art on campus. There is an accompanying video which provides an overview of the works on campus. The website allows users to browse works by location, artist, and title and for selected works users can read an artist bibliography and an essay about the work. These selected works also include archival images and documents relevant to the work.

The VRC supports this project by maintaining the UChicago Public Art Collection and Archive in collaboration with the Smart Museum of Art, UChicago Arts, and Christine Mehring of the Department of Art History. This dedicated, password-protected collection is accessible to all on-campus users and off-campus users who have a CNetID and password. If you’d like to explore more, the Luna collection contains archival photographs, audio, video, conservation information, and other ephemeral documentation pertaining to the public works on campus.

Vamonde is a recently launched urban story telling app that uses curated content and GPS to connect users to significant places.

Rebecca Zorach, a professor of art history at Northwestern University created a module in Vamonde called “Lost Murals of Chicago” in which she takes app users to 8 murals in Chicago and provides information about the artists, how the murals were created, and other signifiant facts about the mural site. Vamonde provides a map with GPS walking directions from a user’s location to the mural site.

Check out the Vamonde app to go on your own walking tour of “Lost Murals of Chicago” or other tours on the app. Right now the app only features content from Chicago, and other tours such as “The Inside Track: Art on CTA” and “Humboldt Park: Jens Jensen’s Experimental Grounds” might be of interest. Vamonde is currently only available at the iTunes App Store and requires users to sign up for a free account.

Recently, the University of Glasgow announced the launch of a new website cataloging all known architectural projects of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect, designer, and painter. Additionally, “the site also provides entries for projects by the practice, John Honeyman & Keppie / Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh during the Mackintosh years 1889–1913; images and data from the office record books; a catalogue raisonné of over 1200 drawings by Mackintosh and the practice; analytical and contextual essays; biographies of over 400 clients, colleagues, contractors and suppliers; timeline; glossary; and bibliography.”

For anyone doing research on Mackintosh, this site is a treasure trove of digitized archival documents, photographs, and even job books kept by the firm founded by Honeyman. There are also essays on Mackintosh, an interactive map related to his work, a glossary, and very thorough bibliography.

Christie’s Auction House brought in the highest total for an auction in history last night, grossing $852.9 million at the contemporary sale in New York. New records were also set for 11 artists, among them Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Peter Doig, Martin Klippenberger, and Seth Price. The stars of the night were Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis [Ferus Type](1960) and Four Marlons (1966), which sold early going for $81.9 million and $69.6 million, respectively. “By the time the second figure was reached, the crowd—whether reeling from the action or no longer capable of being surprised or just no longer impressed by anything under $80 million—forgot to clap,” says Dan Duray from ArtNews. Although the prior nights’ Sotheby’s sale was a disappointment bringing in only $343.6 million, the two weeks of sales at both auction houses took in a total of some $2 billion, comforting many that the art market is alive and kicking.

The Digital Comic Museum has digitized more than 15,000 comic books from the Golden Age of comics, or in the years before 1959. The DCM has a forum for users to submit historical research and commentary on the comics. While you won’t find any Marvel superheroes here, there’s a wide variety of themes within the comic world, including romance, Westerns, combat, crime, supernatural, and horror. Users have to create an account to download images.

The website presents the complete catalogs of the Vienna Secession (1898–1905), twenty digitized postcards of exhibition installations, and posters, along with related artworks. The website also features a related bibliography and a timeline of events pertaining to the Vienna Secession.

Stanford University and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have partnered on the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collection of more than 14,000 high-resolution images. The archive has two areas of content, including Images, which contains about 12,000 individual images of prints, illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects. The section on Parliamentary Archives contains primary source documents arranged chronologically. Users can browse by date or subject, and search both the Images and Parliamentary Archives sections at once or individually. The project also contains an excellent timeline of the Revolution.

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently announced that it is donating nearly 200,000 items from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archives to five international institutions. The archival materials include black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, and color transparencies, and will be distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of the Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The Foundation’s gift marks the first time an artist’s foundation has devoted its resources to the work of other artists.

Harry Shunk (1924–2006, born in Germany) and János [Jean] Kender (1937–2009, born in Hungary) made the bulk of their images from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, documenting more than 400 artists in their studios, at openings, and during performances, making this collection an important documentary collection of the modern art and art history. Artists depicted include Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol among many others.

After Shunk died in 2006, the Foundation began acquiring the archive by purchase between 2008 and 2012. After acquiring the images, the Foundation “preserved, cataloged, and digitized the images” and made them available in an online collection on their website. You can view the archive’s list of artists to view PDFs of thumbnails that depict that specific artist. For information about using the images in scholarly publications, contact Shunk-Copyright@lichtensteinfoundation.org.

The Cleveland Institute of Art recently redesigned and improved the functionality of the Contemporary Artists Index, a fantastic resource that documents artists, artist groups, photographers, craftspeople, designers, and design firms. The Index now contains more than 31,000 artists appearing in more than 1,800 exhibition catalogs and art publications.

Over the summer, the VRC announced that images of artworks held by the South Side Community Art Center were newly added to our LUNA database. We’re now thrilled to announce that the collection has been made publicly available in LUNA, so anyone can access the more than 350 images!